Slammed for breaching the privacy of users, Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, get a taste of their own medicine in Columbia Pictures' latest foray into technology, The Social Network.
If you know anything about technology and social media, you've at the very least heard of Facebook.
The networking site was launched in 2004 by Harvard roommates and fellow computer science students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
Zuckerberg came up with the idea for Facebook when he was a little bit drunk and blogging about being dumped. It briefly started off as a voting site comparing students' pictures to farm animals and was transformed to the media giant it is today.
Read more and see the trailer after the jump.
In a series of late night posts in 2003 when it was launched, Zuckerberg said things like:
I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even10 p.m. and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is
open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous
facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to
pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more
attractive.
--9:48 pm
Yea, it's on. I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are goingto fit into this whole thing (you can't really ever be sure with farm
animals...), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.
--11:09 pm
Let the hacking begin.
--12:58 am
Originally limited to Harvard students, then college students
in general, the site is now accessible to anyone over the age of 13 and
has more than 400 million active users. So it comes as no
surprise that the world's most used social network site -- a site used
as a means of research for a lot of tech geeks -- has made it to the
big screen.
The film stars Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale, Zombieland)
as Zuckerberg, along with Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation, The
Office), and Justin Timberlake. The unlikely cast battles it out as
we see what it was really like for Zuckerberg launching a site that
received 22,000 hits within its first two hours (yes, we said hours) of
inception. You'll see a lot of controversies, lawsuits, and then some.
Our real question is: Will there be a MySpace
movie next, and will anyone watch that?
See the first
official trailer below. Aaron Sorkin (of A Few Good Men and
West Wing fame) holds the main writing credit, with David Fincher (Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) directing, making this film actually
look good. It claims to be a comedy/drama, but we're not sure where the laughs will stem from, with all the tales of sex, money, and betrayal to tell.
It takes tech movies away from the sci-fi/suspense category
and into the mainstream. The film comes out October 1. Zuckerberg's take on all of this? "I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive."
